2016 Presidential Election

The Special Counsel has filed his reply memo in the matter of the sentencing of Michael Flynn in compliance with Judge Sullivan’s order. I have embedded the memo and attachments as redacted below. Please take the following comments as provisional in nature and check my own comments against the document itself. Reading these materials quickly this afternoon, I observe that the only document contemporaneous with the interview is one page »

The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General conducted an investigation of the gap in text messages during the period December 15, 2016, through May 17, 2017, from the cell phones assigned to famous FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The Office of Inspector General Cyber Investigations Office was asked to attempt recovery of these missing text messages for the period in issue. The Inspector General has just »

Reading the transcript of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees last week, I formed the strong impression that Comey falls somewhat short of the straight shooter image by which he presents himself. He has learned how to play a G-man on television. The reality, however, departs from the image. I posted the transcript of Comey’s testimony last week in “Comey doesn’t know and »

Andrew McCarthy has a deep reading of the 40-page sentencing memo filed filed by New York prosecutors in the campaign finance case against Michael Cohen. Reading the memo with a trained eye, Andy explains “Why Trump is likely to be indicted by Manhattan US Attorney.” I posted the memo and summarized it in Cohen can and cant (1)” Andy goes much further than I was able to in making out »

Former FBI Director James Comey lies at the heart of the biggest scandal in American political history. He appeared before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees yesterday to testify about it. FOX News reports on his testimony here. The committees released the partially redacted transcript this afternoon; I have posted it below. Comey seems to have picked up a trick or two from the kind of people he used to »

The Special Counsel referred his investigation of Michael Cohen in part to the Southern District of New York. The Special Counsel entered into a plea agreement with Cohen to one count of false statements to Congress. Both the Special Counsel and the US Attorney for the Southern District filed sentencing memos late yesterday afternoon. I discuss the 38-page sentencing memo filed by the Southern District prosecutors in the adjacent post. »

In my contrarian “Notes on the Cohen plea,” I made these points among others: • Thanks to the work of Rep. Devin Nunes and his Republican colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee, we know of actual collusion by a presidential campaign with organs of Russian intelligence. I refer to the Clinton campaign’s work with the friends of Vladimir Putin via the Perkins Coie, Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele. It’s »

Fake news is a serious problem in our political life. I’m not referring to a pathetically small number of Facebook ads bought by Russian provocateurs. I’m talking about the fake news that was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee; fabricated by Democratic Party-allied consultants; propagated by the FBI and the CIA; promoted by the broadcast networks, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington »

Michael Doran has followed the Russia hoax with the same attention and attitude that I have. He sees the Russia hoax for what it is and is mystified by the lack of interest in the Clinton campaign’s apparent collusion with Russian intelligence. He understands the perversity of the production. He finds the Mueller Switch Project to be corrupt from its inception and as implemented. Back in January, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes »

We have closely followed the revelations related to Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and their work on behalf of the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign. We weren’t supposed to know about it. Simpson of course lies at the heart of the proposition that the Trump campaign “colluded” with the organs of the Russian government in the course of the campaign. Simpson commissioned the Steele Dossier and gave his bill of goods to the »

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a big story in the Russia hoax genre. Reported by Byron Tau, Dustin Volz and Shelby Holliday, the story runs under the headline GOP Operative Secretly Raised at Least $100,000 in Search for Clinton Emails” (accessible here on Outline. Here are the opening paragraphs: A veteran Republican operative and opposition researcher solicited and raised at least $100,000 from donors as part of an effort to »

I recently quoted Seth Lipsky’s unsigned New York Sun editorial “The president in a vise” observing of the Mueller prosecutions: “This is part of an effort by the Democrats and their collaborators to overturn a presidential election that they thought they would win.” The editorial expressed my thoughts exactly. By the same token, so does the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial “Let the people decide: A special prosecutor shouldn’t negate an election.” »

Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Foley & Lardner and a bona fide legal expert on the thorny federal law of campaign finance. She brings her expertise to bear on the question we examined yesterday in “Both sides not now.” She asks what is by now a rhetorical question concerning the Mueller Switch Project: “Fair-minded investigation or partisan witch hunt?” Cleta bores in »

Kim Strassel decries the inherently one-sided nature of the Mueller Switch Project in her weekly Wall Street Journal column. Her column runs under the headline “When justice is partial.” She writes: If there is only “one set of rules,” where is Mr. Mueller’s referral of a case against Hillary for America? Federal law requires campaigns to disclose the recipient and purpose of any payments. The Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS »

My point, and I did have one, in placing the Michael Cohen plea agreement and related charges before readers here this morning, was to note “the trouble down the road for others,” as I put it. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the the chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen and Donald Trump »

RealClearPolitics has just posted Paul Sperry’s 7,000-word investigation into the FBI’s misrepresentations and nonfeasance in the matter of the Weiner laptop and the Clinton emails. Sperry’s column runs under the headline “Despite Comey Assurances, FBI Failed to Examine Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails.” Sperry reports that the FBI examined only a tiny fraction of hundreds of thousands of Hillary Clinton emails discovered on the Weiner laptop six weeks before »

The organs of the federal government have had the Trump campaign, President Trump and those around him under the microscope since some time before his first day in office. The counterintelligence investigation formally opened at by the FBI in July 2016 has become the Mueller Switch Project dogging the Trump administration. Whatever happened to “collusion”? It has served its purposes to feed the campaign against Trump while something like the »